Keller divides what the Bible calls the ministry of the Word in three levels, which are preaching (level 3: Paul and Peter’s preaching in the book of Acts), all the public teaching and communication of faith at church (level 2: 1 Peter 4:10-11), and Christians’ communicating their faith to their neighbors (level 1: Colossians 3:16), enriching the fuller meaning of the ministry of the Word. Of course the book never loses sight of the unique importance of public preaching. What is important is, as much as public preaching is important and unique in the ministry of the church, all Christians are likewise obliged to communicate their faith in their relationship to the world. Seen from this angle, this book is not just for those specialized in some types of Christian ministries, but for every Christian who is interested in communicating their faith to their neighbors, which would make this book’s potential audience to be all Christians.
At any rate, Keller argues that a great preaching entails two important responsibilities. First is the responsibility to the biblical text, and the second to the people in particular cultural setting. These two responsibilities are centered on preaching Christ from all Scripture. Preaching Christ from the Scripture to be alive in the lives of contemporaries, that is the responsibility of the preacher. For this work Keller speaks of three tasks. First is knowing the gospel; second is knowing the people in a particular cultural setting and the dynamics of human change and transformation; third is to examine the preacher’s deep inner motives and spiritual growth through the aid of the Holy Spirit. This review discusses these three tasks.
First Task-Knowing the Gospel
When explaining the gospel, Keller contrasts it with the opposite notion of the gospel, which is self-salvation. According to Keller, both traditional society oriented to community and modern western society oriented to individuals have the strategy of salvation in common. This has to do with how each individual establishes her identity and self-worth. In traditional societies, each person’s identity and self-worth is determined by how well that person fulfills the community’s expectation and the assigned role. In modern western societies, regardless of what each person’s community wants her to do, each person’s identity and self-worth is determined by how well that person expresses her own unique personality and desires. What these two have in common is that both believe that through individual effort one can earn one’s identity and self-worth. In other words, self-salvation is what both share in common. As is shown in Luke 15’s parable of the prodigal, those who seek self-salvation this way will feel either superior or inferior to those who they think are better or worse than themselves. In their relationship to God, those who seek self-salvation will demand God of what they think they have earned. If they feel that they have not done enough, they feel that their worth from the eyes of God will be lessened, while they will assert their self-worth according to how much they have worked for God. In other words, if they find their identity from their performance, their identities will be fluctuating depending on their performance, which will lead to constant comparison and conflicts with others. On the other hand, the gospel of God says that our individual identity should not consist in how we perform, but in the love and recognition of Jesus Christ, from where we should begin to perform. The more we see how uniquely precious we are in the eyes of God, the more we will be able to bring forth more unique and precious fruits, the gospel says.
Alongside this, one of the blindspots of self-salvation approach Keller cautions us in this book is the moralistic approach to the gospel. Namely, this approach says that Christianity is all about living a moral, just life, and that is all. For those who never heard of the message of the gospel will automatically see the gospel to be equal to morality. Therefore, breaking this formula is absolutely important for Keller, for unless this formula is broken there is no way for people to rightly understand the gospel, and even for regular churchgoers this formula is often found. For this reason, Keller insists that preachers should preach the gospel all the time, in contradistinction from morality. If morality is to be understood as our effort to earn our own self-worth, it is not hard to understand moralism as part of self-salvation. Additionally, such moralism and self-salvation is transcultural. While this is open to scholarly debates (especially among anthropologists), I don’t have relevant research materials, I will share my thought if it is brought up in the future.
Second Task-Understanding People in a Particular Cultural Setting, and their Change/Transformation Dynamic
Regarding this second task, Keller spends as much part on it as he did on the first task. This is because understanding people in a particular cultural setting and their change/transformation dynamic is just as important as sharing the gospel and communicating faith. In fact, this book is worth the buy for this second part (chs. 4, 5, 6). This includes Keller’s understanding of how faith communicates itself in culture, as well as how we humans change through preaching. In chapter 4, Keller provides his own strategy of “adapting in order to confront” for the purpose of communicating faith with people in a particular cultural setting. It is neither to find some commonalities between faith and their culture, nor to confront it. Rather, it is to find commonalities and points of contact between faith and a particular cultural setting in order to challenge and confront it. Embedded in this way of communicating faith is Keller’s understanding of culture, going beyond a mere strategic skill of maintaining conversation between faith and culture. According to Keller, there is no culture which does not have some elements that the gospel can affirm. Because there are always such elements in every culture, what we have to know above all is to find those commonalities between faith and culture. This work itself requires love and care toward the people in a particular culture. Without some substantial effort to understand and communicate with them, talking about faith will be a mere technique devoid of love, which is not the gospel at all.
One more thing to keep in mind is to get out of the “Christians/Christianity = the gospel” formula. Allthroughout the book Keller consistently speaks of the entire otherness of the gospel, which means that even for believers, no one can completely possess the gospel or identify with it. Therefore, no one ought to think of herself as the possessor of the gospel. In case anyone does, that person tends to feel superior to those whom she shares the gospel with. This goes directly against our sinfulness spoken of by the gospel, as well as against Paul’s famous saying that I am what I am by the grace of God.
Supposing that we maintain this mindset, Keller finds it very important to cite some secular sources in order to earn people’s trust. He goes on to list a group of scholars whom Keller himself has quoted in his own sermons as he makes a case for various topics in regard to the Christian faith. I would say that this might be a very practical guide to any preacher who would like to understand the streams and directions of secular culture, thereby reading what an ordinary secular person might think of in regard to important topics of life and meaning. I will briefly list some of the important scholars, most of whom are non-Christians, which Keller quotes in his sermons.
Idols: David Foster Wallace, professor at Pomona College, a novelist, and a literary scholar, while never a person of faith, says that everyone worships something. This is very helpful for establishing points of contact between secular culture and Christian worship. He also discusses his own understandings of idols, which have important bearings on how to communicate the gospel in secular culture.
Satan: Andrew Delbanco of Columbia University, in his book The Deaht of Satan argues the modern perspective on evil reducing evil to socio-structural and psychological dimensions only has let us miss the radical totality of evil. While this is a very idiosyncratic claim, Delbanco’s claim in this regard, even though he is not a Christian, would definitely be helpful for establishing some points of contact between faith and secular people.
Original Sin: C.E.M. Joad, a British atheist intellectual who came to faith later, argues that the left are disappointed in people’s irrationality toward evil because they rejected the doctrine of the original sin. In other words, the doctrine is able to explain people’s irrational aspects.
Other than this, Keller says that if each preacher does research sufficiently she will be able to find many other secular/non-Christian scholars whose claims can help establish points of contact between faith and secular culture. It remains to be seen that more preachers engage in this task and provide more credible support for the claims of the gospel.
What is as important as understanding people in their particular cultural setting is to understand the change/transformation dynamic of each person. Keller argues in chapter 6, Preaching to the Heart, deals with this in close detail. Heart is at the core of Keller’s theological anthropology. Heart in the Bible is not our modern term of emotion, nor is it involved in logical thinking, as in modern reason. Rather, heart refers to the motivational structure governing our emotions, reason, and will, thus controlling what we say and what we do. In the same vein, Keller also refers to heart as the structure of order for our loves. In other words, whatever we love or trust, that our reason finds rational, our emotions find it valuable, and our will finds it doable, according to Keller (159).
In this light, when the gospel is rightly proclaimed, the first thing that happens is for our fundamental motivational structures to be revealed. What we put our foundational trust in is going to be disclosed, and secondly, through such disclosure, the gospel shows that Christ is much superior and better in every possible way than what we loved and trusted so far. In this work of preaching the gospel, preacher should be clear in her logic and real in her showing Christ. What is meant by real is, at the time of people’s listening to the gospel message, preaching should be in such a way as to help people’s hearts know the presence of Christ, so that their fundamental motivational structure experiences a crack. Howerver, easier is said than done. Keller gives a specific example through a conversation he had with a teenage girl when he was a younger pastor in Virgina. She was very desolate about the fact that no boy was interested in her, and Keller was trying to console her. To this she said, “Yes, I know that Jesus loves me, and I also know that he has saved me from sin. I know that I am going to go to heaven. But what good is that when there is no boy looking at you?” Keller’s analysis regarding her heart is as follows. Christ’s love for her is not real to her. What is more important than Christ’s love for her in determining her self-identity and self-worth is how many boys would look on her favorably. Therefore, if the gospel is rightly preached to her, she will feel less acute about boys’ not liking her, since she has put her self-identity and worth in the love of Christ and not in boys’ love for her. Preaching is a work of art inducing such change in each person. That is, when the gospel is proclaimed, this teenage girl’s motivational structure will change. There are a lot of specific examples available in YouTube and iTunes, so you can go ahead and listen to some of Keller’s messages in order to find out how Keller practices what he preaches.
Third Task-Knowing the Preacher’s Inner Motivation and Spiritual Growth through the Aid of the Holy Spirit.
What Keller says in the last section is that preaching is a work of understanding the gospel, that of understanding people in a particular cultural setting, and that of knowing the preacher’s own self. The reason for that is, the preacher is able to manage to pull off the first and second tasks apart from walking closely with God. However, those who do the work of preaching excellently without having relationship with God might be the most cursed ones. A preacher who keeps preaching the gospel yet is never challenged nor changed by it! Thus, the gift of insight from the Holy Spirit to the preacher is that of self-examination. Keller expresses it this way: not reading and meditating the Word of God for preaching, but preaching naturally coming out of regular reading and meditating on the Word of God. This means that the preacher has to constantly read and meditate on the Word of God.
What Keller draws his attention to in the very last part of this book is what he calls a subtext, meaning a hidden intention of the preacher in her preaching. Keller recognizes that each preacher has a hidden intent, apart from what comes out of that particular precher’s mouth. Sometimes that intent might be to show off how well the preacher does her preaching. Other times it might be to affirm how well the community of faith is following the will of God. In some cases it might be to glorify the truth proclaimed from the mouth of the preacher. In this latter case what Keller particular cautions is that, while the lifting up of the truth itself might not seem problematic, such proclamation sometimes is seen as rudeness or inadvertent exclusion of others. Considering that the intent of the gospel is to proclaim God’s message to unbelievers so that they could come back to Jesus, one sees immediately how far away this subtext is from the original intent of Jesus’ gospel. Last but not least subtext which Keller deems most ideal is that Christ is worshipped through preaching. Since Christ is for the neglected, the weak, and the poor, worshipping Christ will inevitably preclude any kind of exclusion of the people group aforementioned. Everyone is invited as a sinner, called to repent of her sin. Christ’s gospel is not about recognizing some according to their merit, and not recognizing others according to their merits, but about what God has done for all sinners through Christ. Therefore, preaching in which Christ is worshipped and lifted up is the most apposite to the original intent of preaching the gospel.
I have spoken of this before several times. Keller’s theological anthropology has given me an initiative to begin my studies in the PhD program, and even for now, his theology is a continual inspiration for my getting ready to write a dissertation. This is not to say that I wholeheartedly subscribe to Keller’s denomination (PCA)’s doctrinal positions. Even so, there is something trans-denominational about Keller’s theological construction, which I would guess is coming from Keller’s engagement with Jonathan Edwards. At an opportune time, I would like to examine how Keller contextualizes Edwards’ theology. For next week, I will do a review of Keller’s book on social justice, called Generous Justice. Thank you.